Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

Search This Blog

13.5.15

Higher education policy going badly wrong this session

While budgetary constraints present
in this cycle could have pressured Louisiana to embark on a long overdue and
needed reshaping of its delivery of higher education, if anything in regards to
this area policy-makers are engaging in counterproductive backpedaling.

The state’s inefficient system has
three issues that prevents it from improving both its quality and efficiency,
all interrelated. First, it
is overbuilt, ranking 18th in per capita spending on higher education as a consequence of too
many institutions chasing too few students, particularly when it comes to
baccalaureate-and-above schools. Second, its
funding is imbalanced, where taxpayers subsidize disproportionately
compared to other states its spending, while average tuition ranks (for study
at senior institutions) only 40th among the states even as in per capita income ranks Louisiana 29th,
meaning the ability to pay is there for families but its taxpayer spending on
this is outsized. Third, it
spends inefficiently within institutions, as evidenced by the fact that the
baccalaureate-and-above institutions in the similar state of Oregon generate
much more proportionally of their own resources with lower expenditures per capita, in part by having a much
higher proportion of their students in junior institutions.

These realities mean the optimal
reform course would seek to demote, merge, or close senior schools, to raise
tuition levels, and to reshape incentives so as to prevent inefficient
expenditures. Institutional realignment at the four-year-degree-and-above level
can’t happen overnight, but at least the groundwork can begin this year.
Tuition increases and shifting of incentives, however can commence to take
effect in the next fiscal year that begins in less than two months. Yet with
one exception, not only are legislators failing to do what’s best for higher
education delivery specifically and the citizenry generally on that issue, but
they actually are doing the opposite.

Earlier
this week, House Republicans and Democrats alike went on a mass
pickpocketing of taxpayers with the intent of devoting these tax hikes to
funding almost exclusively higher education, meeting a goal of keeping funding
about level at last year’s total. Even as the alleged doomsday scenario that
would have reduced taxpayers’ contribution to higher education by over 80 percent
from last year was unsustainable (which, for point of reference, would have
left the proportion of that subsidy still about three times the size of
Oregon’s), because the driver of the need for a bloated contribution comes from
the overbuilt nature of the system curable only over several years and not all
at once, some cuts would have been beneficial to provide motivation for
efficiency in operations and in raising tuition, where this increased market
discipline would compound the incentives away from supporting low priority,
mission-peripheral production. Yet no explicit acknowledgment in the budget-building
task of the necessity of tuition increases got baked into the state’s spending
plan, showing a preference instead for increasing taxpayers’ burdens further and
refusing to ask students to pay their fair share for a product that
overwhelmingly benefits them over the citizenry as a whole.

Aside from budgeting,
representatives additionally have embarked on jacking up the expenses of taxpayers
with several measures designed to justify the higher education bloat. The least
objectionable, passed out of the House, was HB 129 by
state Rep. Patrick
Jefferson, which allows select historically black universities and college
to charge out-of-students in-state tuition. Differences in these kinds of
tuition are supposed to reflect the missing portion of taxpayer subsidy, but
this bill now asks taxpayers to eat it. The idea is that more out-of-state
students enrolling than without the cut in tuition for them at the margins
(because fixed costs remain the same and/or slack resources exist) would make
up for the difference in lost revenues, but that is a chancy argument at best.

(Oddly, the bill’s fiscal note
says that Grambling State University expects its nonresident enrollments to triple to
450, producing a surplus. But this assumes that, for example, the extra faculty
members hired to handle this load – it’s unrealistic to assume resources are so
slack there already that existing faculty members can handle the increase –
won’t impose any additional costs. If that is in fact the assumption, this
unwittingly justifies the removal of any taxpayer contribution to higher
education.)

Worse is HB 333 by
state Rep. Wesley
Bishop, which passed committee, reverting back to the practice from 2012-14
that allowed admission of students that needed a single remedial course at a
senior institution and who could take that there. The current policy of not
admitting anybody with need of any remedial coursework benefits twofold: it
reduced the proportion of incapable students (as some will not pass even the
remedial classes) at senior institutions and it does not use these schools’
resources in a less efficient way, i.e. faculty with talents appropriate to
these institutions’ missions, which do not include remedial education, who are
more expensive assets end up teaching courses that could be done more
efficiently and effectively at junior institutions. This bill subverts that
best practice.

But worst is HB 411 by
state Rep. Ted
James, which passed committee, that would amend the Constitution to allow
systems to set their own admission standards. Not only would this confuse the
policy role of the Board of Regents with the management role of the four
systems, but it also would give license to lower standards in systems and thus waste
much more money. The cruel but simple fact is that as admissions standards for
senior institutions go lower, you get proportionately fewer students who can
succeed, and that means more class failures and degree incompletions, and the
consequence of more wasted resources. Gaming the system to lower instructional
standards to prevent this produces the same: a worthless degree for the
occupations for which recipients of which would be intended. While some low
achievers in secondary education who want four-year college degrees later in
life do have the capacity to earn that degree, there’s no reason that these
diamonds in the rough can’t begin their academic careers at community colleges,
a primary part of these junior institutions’ missions being precisely to serve
these kinds of students, rather than at more expensive senior institutions
where this is not part of their missions and should not be for optimal resource
usage.

All in all, these bills really are
designed just to do one thing: shovel more students into senior institutions as
a method of justifying their existences – even though consultant after
consultant has identified as a major problem of Louisiana higher education
being it shunts too many students into its four-year schools with their more
expensive, less appropriate programs for low achievers, needlessly costing
taxpayers extra money because that education is more expensive and more students than
necessary drop out. There could not be a set of bills more injurious and
subversive to what Louisiana higher education needs than these.

The only bright spot indicating a
correct reform agenda in higher education in Louisiana appears in the Senate,
which has voted to decouple tuition from Taylor Opportunity Program for
Scholars awards and wants to have amended the Constitution to allow systems to
increase tuition on their own. But the funding and policy decisions so far made
in the House are entirely contrary to improving the quality and efficiency in
delivery of higher education in the state. Policy-makers need to understand
this if they don’t want to turn back progress when they should strive to make
it, and thereby damage further both this aspect of state policy and the
citizenry.

About Me

Subscribe To

Comment publishing requirements

You must be a registered user with an OpenID-compliant service to leave comments, which will be moderated. Any comments that do not address issues in the post for which they are intended will not be posted; neither will those that utterly lack intellectual coherence.